From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 95 13:07:37 PDT
To: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>
Subject: Re: cryptography eliminates lawyers?
Message-ID: <199509082006.NAA24910@ix8.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>> > Telecoms will certainly break the professional 
>> > monopoly of lawyers (and other professionals).
>> This I don't.  How do you mean exactly?
>Licensing requires the ability to outlaw unlicensed transactions.  
>Since the Net trumps censorship and allows consultations at a 
>distance, it cracks licensing,

It does reduce the ability of geographical organizations
to restrict who does business there, so markets will probably
force some shakeups in jurisdictions.  But lawyer work seems
to mostly involve either contracts or courts - as long as 
courts are still run by governments, they can restrict who
gets to practice in them, and who's allowed to write paper that
they'll judge disputes about.  Crypto _could_ be used for
a modern version of the Stamp Tax - documents might need to 
be digitally signed by Certified Lawyers (though of course
that may be lawyers putting their stamps on work mostly done
by clerks.)  

Crypto may make it easier to resolve some kinds of disputes,
by identifying who did what when, but the net isn't going to
make the number of disputes decrease....
#---
#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
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